"One stop" book for cob building

books:


	• Building With Cob: A Step-by-step Guide Adam Weismann, Katy Bryce Green Books, 2006 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 14 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Building My knowledge

If you are truly interested in using cob and building environmentaly friendly homes, then this book is for you. It is very descriptave in it's wording and the pictures in it help as well. This book is a must have if you plan to use or build with cob!

Todo lo que hace falta saber...

En este volumen aparece todo lo que se necesita saber sobre una construcción Cob, lo que hecho a faltar aquí como en la mayoría de libros de construcción natural es el cálculo de estructuras para el tejado, y su correcto dimensionado.

Un libro fascinante con multitud de detalles y esquemas

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"One stop" book for cob building

Those of you who have read "The Hand-Sculpted House" by Ianto Evans will like this book. It is an excellent guide to building with cob. I felt that every aspect of building a house was covered in enough detail that you could start building with cob if you were even a little bit handy. Although building a house is covered well, it includes building fireplaces and cob ovens, too.

I paid forty five dollars for my copy at the Midwest Renewable Energy Fair and see now that I could have saved fifteen dollars. Still, if you are looking for just one book to cover many aspects of using cob then you won't go wrong with this book.

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Building with Earth, i.e. Adobe

Even after reading this book pretty carefully, and even looking it up in the dictionary, I never got a good definition of the word 'COB.' None the less, what he's talking about would be called adobe in this country. That is, you take subsoil with a reasonably high clay content, mix it with sand, straw and perhaps a few other things, and you get a remarkably strong building material.

I was involved with a friend that wanted to modify his adobe houst by taking out a window and converting it into a door. The adobe in his house was well aged, about a hundred years. Pulling the window out was easy. Then we got to removing the adobe. We intended to just pick up the bricks and move them aside. They wouldn't move. Pry them with a long iron rod, they wouldn't move. Hit them with a pick and it hardly made a dent. Eventually he got the bricks out of the way using a jackhammer.

This book is on building houses out of earth. It's written in England where there are an estimated half million cob houses. And it talks about the way things are done over there. Not too different than here, except for the building codes. But, of coure, the building codes in this country are quite different in detail of how they are in England. I don't have any idea how many there are in the US. It is certainly no longer a common building method here. My guess is that building within a city limit will be difficult.

All in all, this is probably the best book I've seen on the subject.

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Beautifully thorough

Lavishly illustrated, this is a well-organized, clearly written volume describing the processes necessary to build a range of structures using earth and straw (and a number of other natural materials). The drawings and photographs really help support the text, providing a rich introduction into the world of cob and natural building. An exceptional book for anyone thinking about getting involved with cob building.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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